What would you like to see included in a Crucial M4 128GB review?

I'll be making a review of the Crucial M4 128GB.

I mainly want to do real world benchmarks.

- Install performance
- File copy
- Application launching
- Booting
- Virus scan
- Multi tasking
- Battery life

any other requests? Preferably something that's useful to many people.

 

Nice idea

I would like to see:
- shutdown speed
- batter life comperad with your HDD
- cold start of movie (DVD rip for example) in Windows media player
- speed of scans like MSE or Spybot or CCleaner
- CRD and AS SSD benchmarks (also MSAHCI vs Intel RST)?
- possible to make script which run 20 programs in 1 time?
- boot time measured by this program: Download windows Boot timer and application Launch Timer
- possible to measure SATA 2 speeds?

 

Thanks for the suggestions.

If I could somehow force it to Sata II speeds that would be interesting. Any idea how?

 

you should compare it to a hdd and show how it's much worse than a hdd


yes, i'm enjoying that soooo much


i could give you some terrible software setups to test.. ableton live suite demo being one

 

I will include a 5400rpm Toshiba spinner. Mind you, it has 320GB on one platter so it's pretty speedy. It will probably give the Crucial M4 a hard time

 

If you're going to do this properly:

Don't compare a ~$300 SSD to a ~$40 HDD. Use a Scorpio Black 750GB or an XT Momentus Hybrid for your 'comparision'.

Even a two year old (circa late 2009) model Hitachi TravelStar 7K500 would be a better 'comparison'.

See:
Buy the Crucial m4 128GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5 SSD at TigerDirect.ca


No, I'm not saying that either of those HDD's will "give the Crucial M4 a hard time..." - but if you want something that will be useful for people going to compare the latest HDD/SSD tech, then that is the least you can do.

A 5400 RPM HDD (even one with 320GB/platter... yawn) is so 2005, performance-wise that it is not even worth going to that trouble of testing/comparing it to 2011 technology.

I agree 100% with testing 'only' real world performance. Leave the benchmarks to marketing and their propaganda.

The 'real' test for me would be the identical notebook system (minimum: last years 'i' system with 8GB RAM and Win7x64u) with only the HDD/SSD exchanged between the tests. Both tested in 'plugged in' and 'battery' modes. With no tweaks applied. With a clean Windows install on each drive (timed, of course).

Looking forward to it!

(-tiller: still playing with 4 SSD's at the moment and deciding what to return. lol... ).

 

Yes I will try to get include a Momentus XT and WD Black.

 

When will be review done? Expected date? Thank you!

 

Not sure and I don't like time pressure so I will not make any promises

any ideas on how to force SATA II mode?

 

Send me that SSD, I have SATA II

 

Maybe you have the opportunity to compare with a Intel 510 120GB?

;-)

 

if you believe that, then you're so wrong...

include technical benchmarks to measure everything and show the numbers. only then we can validate if the rest of the benchmarks will be of a valid comparison, the realworld ones. as it is great to validate teh sata2 performance. and the fact that the test system doesn't cripple the tests in any way.

synthetic benchmarks are the ones that are 100% repeatable and shoudl be equal on every system. if they're not, forget about all other tests.

anyways, you can't be tiller, stating the hdd could not beat the ssd. seriously, who are you, hacking tillers account?



any other ssds to compare to it? any random systems to compare to?

 

What machine are you testing it on?

Could you please run some benchmarks both on an unencrypted partition, and within a partition that is encrypted as AES in Truecrypt? Thank you

 

Benchmarks will be run on Toshiba C660 with Core i5 2410m, 4GB and Windows 7 x64.

I will try to include other SSDs too.

 

Try run some long Movie for test a batery life. I always watch movies in train on batery when Iam coming home from college, I would like to know if SSD makes some more minutes copared to HDD. Thanks!

 

I would like to do one battery life test. Maybe a movie run down or maybe a surfing script. Doing more battery life tests will be to time consuming.

 

Movie is more objective than surfing. When you surf, it depends a lot on how many tabs, how many CPU it take etc. Movie will be stable for your measurements I think.

 

If I do the surf script it will be one page, refreshed every 30 seconds or so. That will be stable too.

 

can you test against this floppy disk throughput? just how fast can ssd do 1.44 MB or how many times in one second?:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

 

When will you do this review? Might influence my buying decision...

 

If you ever do any photo editing, could you test it with that? Even a small sample of 10-15 photos on perhaps the black or xt vs the M4? Thanks in advance either way. I do look forward to when you do this.

 

a crash test to see how long it lasts

 

I will try to include some photo editing.

I might have something ready by the end of next week.

 

you're probably going to start get bombarded with pm's starting wednesday. it'll be kind of like kids on a long trip. "are we there yet?"

 

The competition arrived today.

 

hope the vertex dies during the tests. would be a fun laugh.

 

What would be a good way to do it?

I've installed CS5.

 

Yes finally someone who plan to do a review that actually matters. Big Kudos to you Phil

I also suggest you do some video encoding with your review

 

- test install (just install time, install configuration excluded) some huge game from 5GB ISO (HDD vs Vertex vs M4)

 

What would be a good game to test?

 

What about Need For Speed Shift 2? 7GB ISO

 

Use boottimer for time measure: Download windows Boot timer and application Launch Timer Its good program I think, ...better than hand timer.

For run multiple programs try this easy tutorial I found: Batch Script To Open Multiple Programs At Once | PCMech
Run for example 50 programs at once (paint, calculator, etc)
PS: will you measure SATA II? You will probably need different notebook :-/

For measure time runing program look here: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/06/application-startup-timer/

or here: http://www.passmark.com/products/apptimer.htm

 

Honzik1 maybe you have not read my reviews? I always use boottimer for timing boots. It's in the reviews in my signature.

I've used Apptimer before but I don't find it a very handy program. I'll check out the other one.

I start many programs at once by placing them in the startup folder. I don't find it a very important test though, it's not very representative of normal usage imo.

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

Sry Phil, I have never read your review
My notebook is quite "messy" and in startup it run many programs I use....after startup I have 94 processes. I just wanted to know time of run many programs at once, because I dont use clean install all the time.

Boottimer measured 50 seconds to my startup with HDD, but all aplications were still loading and it took next 1 minute when HDD stoped to be busy. I just wanted to know some hard multitasking. Which program you use for measure time for programs? Thank you!

 

Some prorgams are timed, like virus scan in Avast and file copies in AS-SSD.

Other programs I time by hand. For accuracy I don't time jobs less than about 10 seconds and I repeat jobs about 5 times, to get as accurate as possible.

I alway make sure the laptop is booted fresh, so no important file can be in cache.

 

So when are the tests complete?

 

I don't know And I'd rather not make promises. You'll see it when it's ready.

I'm receiving Corsair Force 3 this week.

 

Nice

Which SSDs will you be testing?

 

Wait and see. Got to love the suspense

 

Phil. I'm currently looking to buy an SSD (120-160gb) for a sata II laptop (but, preferably want sata III - so I can transplant it to a better machine when I need to). So, I'm really having trouble deciding between an M4, V3, maybe the new Corsair, but also from various reviews the C300 and even the X25M still do very well... so I'm hoping your TBA review/shootout might just provide the results I need to make my decision. So far, I'm leaning towards the M4.

 

intel 320 series or crucial c300 series. intel 320 is only sata II but the 320 and c300 series have better random speeds which is generally better for general use. sequential speeds are nice too but i'd rather have a porsche than a veyron. fast for everyday use rather than something good to take out on a track.

 

The only thing I wish more review sites had are power consumption figures over one test bed (to keep other hardware constant), especially since for notebook users, battery life is much more important than pure performance (most of the top drives aren't noticeably different in performance). With X drive, you get A battery life vs. Y drive, which has B battery life vs. baseline standard HDD tested in conditions M, N, O (ie. light usage, medium usage, high usage pattern). Single drive reviews aren't typically that helpful IMO, hence why I prefer comparison reviews between the top choices for prospective buyers sorted by controller (Intel, SF22xx, Marvell 88SE9174, Samsung).

 

yeah, well i feel ya on that. i've looked for power consumption and it's a very mixed bag. the speed of the ssd's have changed the way/workload of the processor. the faster you feed your processor the more work it does the more power it consumes. it would seem the processors have been snacking up until the advent of ssd's. i think my cpu needs to go on a diet.

 

Do any SSDs work well without TRIM (M4,V3,C300,new Corsair,X25M,320)?

 

We need to measure power consumption for tasks done.

 

None of the current generation of SSD will continue to work good without TRIM (except for the Kingston V+100 which has exceptional GC routines but also can't be called a 'current' gen SSD either - but should work awesome in RAID0 though! Also (hinted) that this is the controller (Toshiba) used in the Apple SSD's currently available).

Current SSD's rely on TRIM to keep their high performance. Without TRIM it will depend on your specific workload on how long they will work at a sufficiently fast level for you (hopefully still faster than a HDD). It will also depend on the controller used in the SSD. For some, this could be days/weeks before the performance plummets below acceptable levels (me: with a SandForce based SSD) - for others it could be months (4-6 months, or more).

Buying a current SSD for a non-TRIM aware O/S is just not a good match in my opinion. Unless the I/O offered by them is profitable to you and the time/cost/frustration of SE'ing them a few times a year is also offset by the high performance received the rest of the time.

 

what's garbage collection? and what's se'ing?

 

That's why you use the same workbench and test different usage scenarios as I listed in my above post.

 

Power measurements of SSDs aren't very accurate ways of predicting the battery life they will give in laptops.

Sandforce 2200 drives, Kingston V+ (100) and Samsung 470 do pretty well without TRIM.

Sofar the only thing I don't really like about the M4 is that it needs a registry fix to disable LPM. Other than that it's a great drive.

 

GC=Garbage Collection is basically the drive doing a constant TRIM cycle. Not really a true TRIM (because the SSD does not know what is valid data and what is data that can be deleted).

Essentially, GC is a form of defrag for the SSD.

The GC routine simply moves as much data as it can that is in partial nand pages to leave as much as complete 'clean' nand pages available.

SE=Secure Erase is basically resetting all the nand pages and controller data to an 'as brand new' state. Resetting of the controller data is important here because it will clear all the tracking the controller did of the used/unused nand pages.